Middle East crisis live: Israeli forces kill at least nine Palestinians in major West Bank raids | Israel-Gaza war

Julian Borger

The overnight IDF raids in the West Bank reflect growing Israeli unease that the occupied territory is emerging as an increasingly significant third front as its forces battle in Gaza and on the northern border.

Haaretz is quoting military sources as saying one focus of the raids, in which at least nine people are reported dead, was a network suspected of being behind a suicide bombing last week in Tel Aviv.

The backpack bomb is thought to have gone off before the bomber reached his intended target, and only one passerby was hurt. But the incident on 18 August came as a shock to the Israeli public. It was the first suicide bombing in Tel Aviv for eight years.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad both claimed responsibility the day after the blast. The bomber was named as Jaafar Mona, from Nablus on the West Bank, but Haaretz’s sources said the attack was organised by a network based in the Tulkarem area.

The West Bank is being radicalised by the huge scale of civilian deaths from more than ten months of Israeli bombing of Gaza, and by the brutality of radical Israeli settlers seeking to grab Palestinian land by terrorising its residents, who are barely restrained by Israeli security forces.

In a letter to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, the head of the Shin Bet security agency, Ronen Bar, said that the violence of extremist settlers known as the “hilltop youth” was terrorism and could create a significant threat to national security.

At the same time as the West Bank is being radicalised, increasing numbers of weapons are being smuggled into the territory, reportedly with the active involvement of Iran.

Israeli strikes in the West Bank killed at least nine people, Palestinian health authorities said on Wednesday, in a major operation in the occupied territory.

Clashes with the Israeli military in the West Bank have risen sharply since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, as Israel steps up operations against armed militant groups, including Iranian-backed Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The latest military operation occurred Jenin, Tubas and Tulkarm in the West Bank, Reuters reported.

The Israeli military said on Wednesday it killed “five terrorists in an operations room” in Nur Shams camp in Tulkarm.

Reuters was able to verify CCTV footage that showed military vehicles moving down a street in Jenin on Wednesday.

President Joe Biden ordered the construction of a temporary pier to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza earlier this year even as some staffers for the US Agency for International Development (USAid) expressed concerns that the effort would be difficult to pull off and undercut the effort to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings, according to a USAid inspector general report.

Biden announced plans to use the temporary pier in his State of the Union address in March to hasten the delivery of aid to the Palestinian territory besieged by war between Israel and Hamas.

But the $230m military-run project known as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, would operate for only about 20 days. Aid groups pulled out of the project by July, ending a mission plagued by repeated weather and security problems that limited how much food and other emergency supplies could get to starving Palestinians.

“Multiple USAid staff expressed concerns that the focus on using JLOTS would detract from the agency’s advocacy for opening land crossings, which were seen as more efficient and proven methods of transporting aid into Gaza,” according to the inspector general report published on Tuesday. “However, once the president issued the directive, the agency’s focus was to use JLOTS as effectively as possible.”

At least 10 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids and airstrikes across the north of the occupied West Bank, a Red Crescent spokesperson has said, in what a Palestinian news agency described as a “major” Israeli offensive.

The Israeli military (IDF) has continually raided Palestinian communities in the West Bank since the 7 October Hamas attack that sparked the Israel-Gaza war. More than 640 Palestinians have been killed in the assaults and in attacks by Israeli settlers, including more than 100 children.

The IDF expected the latest operation to last several days, the Times of Israel reported citing military sources.

Two Palestinians were killed in the city of Jenin, four others in a nearby village, and four more in a refugee camp near the town of Tubas, said the Red Crescent’s Ahmed Jibril. Fifteen others had been wounded, he said according to AFP.

The Israeli army said early Wednesday it was carrying out an “operation to thwart terrorism in Jenin and Tulkarm” in the northern West Bank. Several “wanted Palestinians” had been detained, the Times reported.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa said Israeli forces were carrying out a “major offensive in the city of Tulkarm”, besieging hospitals and preventing Palestinians from moving in and out of the city.

Military vehicles had stationed themselves around al-Israa Specialized hospital in west Tulkarm and the Shahid Thabet Thabet Governmental hospital, hampering the movement of ambulances, Wafa reported.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider crisis in the Middle East.

At least 10 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli raids and strikes in several towns in the north of the occupied West Bank, a spokesman for the Red Crescent has said.

Two Palestinians were killed in the city of Jenin, four others in a nearby village, and four more in a refugee camp near the town of Tubas, said the Red Crescent’s Ahmed Jibril. Fifteen others had been wounded, he said according to AFP.

The Israeli army said early Wednesday it was carrying out an “operation to thwart terrorism in Jenin and Tulkarm” in the northern West Bank.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa said Israeli forces were carrying out a “major offensive in the city of Tulkarm”, besieging hospitals and preventing Palestinians from moving in and out of the city.

The operation comes two days after Israel said it carried out an air strike on the West Bank that the Palestinian Authority reported killed five people.

Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 640 Palestinians in the West Bank since Hamas’ 7 October attack on Gaza, including many children, according to UN figures.

At least 19 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials.

In other developments:

• A member of Israel’s Bedouin minority who was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October last year has been reunited with his family amid conflicting accounts about his rescue from Gaza. The Israeli military said it had rescued Qaid Farhan Alkadi, 52, from a tunnel “in a complex operation in the southern Gaza Strip”. Later reports in some Israeli media, however, suggested that Alkadi may have initially escaped from the tunnel where he was being held and made his own way to where Israeli forces were operating in Gaza. Hamas claimed it had “released” him.

• Alkadi is only the eighth hostage the Israeli military claims to have rescued during months of operations in Gaza, including during two operations that killed scores of Palestinians. Israel believes there are still 108 hostages inside Gaza and that more than 40 of them are dead.

• An Israeli delegation of working-level officials from the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet will travel to Doha on Wednesday to continue talks with US, Qatari and Egyptian officials with the aim of closing the remaining gaps in the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, according to multiple reports.

• Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has said that cyberspace needed to be regulated, citing the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, Reuters reported. “There need to be laws to regulate cyberspace. Everyone does it. Look at the French, they arrested this man and threatened him with 20 years in prison for breaching their laws,” Khamenei said.

• The UN has said its ability to function in Gaza is being crippled by a flurry of Israeli evacuation orders, herding Palestinians into ever smaller and remote areas, days before a critical effort to contain a polio outbreak. Aid workers warn that without a humanitarian pause, a vaccination drive due to begin this weekend could fail to reach enough children to stop the spread of the virus, which was detected there this month for the first time in 25 years.

• The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers. A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.

• Jen Laerke, the spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office OCHA, has given some details on an uptick in the number of evacuation orders Israel’s military has issued over the past month. Speaking at a UN briefing, Laerke said Israel has issued three evacuation orders since Friday and 16 mass evacuation orders throughout this month. The three issued since Friday have affected 8,000 people in 19 neighbourhoods, Laerke said.

• At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

• Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children. The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.

• Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right extremist Israeli national security minister, threatened that he would build a Jewish synagogue on al-Aqsa mosque compound, the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem. The comments by Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and champion of the settler movement, were condemned by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Israeli officials.

• The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said. Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.

• Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel. “And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”

• The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.

• The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.

• The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised. Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.